People who hold beliefs that go against the official teachings of their religion or the accepted ideas of their time and place.
From Greek 'hairesis,' meaning 'choice' or 'sect,' the idea being that heretics 'chose' to believe something different from orthodoxy. Latin transformed it to 'haereticus,' and it entered English through Church Latin as a label for religious dissenters.
Many people we now consider heroes were called heretics in their time—Galileo was prosecuted for heresy for saying the Earth orbits the Sun, and religious heretics of the past are often considered free thinkers today. The word literally comes from 'choice,' which means heretics are people who chose their own beliefs rather than accepting what they were told—a definition that makes you realize that calling someone a heretic reveals more about the accuser's desire for obedience than about the accused person's actual character.
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